Fury and the Power by John Farris Read Free Book Online

wage, high school diplomas but no real education, birdseed for brains.
    But snatching Betts from under the noses of Blackwelder pros, most of whom were former Treasury Department or FBI agents, required rethinking of his usual routines.
    He had spent the better part of three days prowling San Francisco's international airport in various faces of altered dimension and contours to avoid a biometric matchup from a three-dimensional scan of his bedrock face, available from FBI files. He had tickets for various destinations, hand luggage filled with mundane traveler's needs. With the aid of a tiny digital camera in one earpiece of a CD player and a scarce, very expensive black market device called "Open Sesame"—concealable beneath a Band-Aid—that instantly deprogrammed and sprang locks ordinarily accessible only to magnetic-striped key cards, he probed SFO's security. One of the call girls who worked an airport hotel where international crews stayed provided him with a stolen pilot's ID, which he transformed into an authentic badge of his own. At three A.M. he was virtually invisible as a stoop-shouldered Hispanic man vacuuming the carpets in United's first-class lounge.
    There was no need to leave bodies at the scene of the abduction. He didn't want it to look as if Betts had been kidnapped; he had enough problems with the Bureau already.
    Or was he still keeping score in a game he had lost a long time ago?
    It was the occasional flash of rationality that caught him unaware, that made him pause while staring at his raw scarred face repeated in the cruelly revealing makeup mirrors. A cave-in around his heart while confidence vanished from his undertaker's eyes. A time when his mind, like the Badlands he came from, was a sparsely settled place. If he didn't look away quickly from the bright mirror-trap at these times his body became catatonic, death collecting in his throat.
    Now he was looking, not into a mirror, but a wall of tempered glass, glazed with faces like the dead from his past, among them himself.
    The thunderstorm that had shut down operations at the airport was unforeseen, but it would be useful. A gift from the gods.
    Betts Waring had been heavier, with frizzy-tizzy hair, a few months ago but had tamed the mop and made herself over, into a hard old beaut of a woman with hair now a natural wolf-gray, short and stiff as the bristles of a military hairbrush. She'd done it for him , the Assassin thought, recalling with affection how Betts had cooked breakfast for him at the lake house, played the piano, eager to please and keep him happy, her fear evident in throbbing pulses.
    Betts was about to make him happy all over again.
    He wasn't quite ready to make his move when the window wall shattered from concussion, but he adjusted smoothly to this diversion. Everyone was on their feet with jangled nerves as rain poured in. During his tour as a janitor in the wee hours two nights ago, the Assassin had prepared the carpet, seeding it with a chemical that reacted with water to produce a colorless but noxious gas. No need now to use the laser in his gold cigarette lighter to activate the sprinkler system in the lounge; the rain blowing in would do.
    The Assassin pressed a mask concealed in the palm of one hand against his false nose and waited, eyes on Betts and the Blackwelder ops. The two dozen people in the lounge were scrambling, grabbing hand luggage, purses, laptops, and heading for the door. Confusion, but no panic. Then the gas rising from the soaked carpet hit them like a fast-moving medieval plague.
    Coughing, choking, vomiting. Half blinded by their tears and disabled by retching, the two men from the Blackwelder Organization lost contact with Betts Waring, who was in no better shape, down on one knee, unable to breathe.
    The Assassin pulled her to her feet with his free hand and walked her to the emergency exit, Betts stumbling, red-faced, gasping, puking.
    The alarm went off when he opened the door, as if it